An Iranian Tragedy in America

If you spend a lot of time with Brooklyn boys in striped T-shirts, colored and checkered button-downs, and semi-ironic facial hair, you might have heard of the band the Yellow Dogs. They looked like pretty much every other hip gaggle du borough, and had something of the Strokes about them—songs suitable for a late-night post-punk dance-off. The four members of the band are Iranian, and came to the United States from Tehran in January, 2010, to play at South by Southwest. They applied for political asylum, on the grounds that their freedom of expression was curtailed in Iran, and were granted it last year. The members lived in a townhouse at 318 Maujer Street, in Bushwick, a neighborhood that a French magazine recently dubbed the new “lair of the loft generation”—no longer a “quartier destroy.”

Sometime after midnight on Monday morning, Ali Akbar Mohammadi Rafie, another musician from Tehran, climbed onto the roof of that townhouse from an adjacent building, carrying an assault rifle. Once inside, he found Arash Farazmand, the Yellow Dogs drummer, in his bedroom, and killed him. Farazmand’s younger brother Soroush, the band’s guitarist, was on his own bed with a laptop; Rafie shot him through the chest. The other two members of the band—Koory Mirz, the bassist, and Siavash Karampour, the lead singer, who goes by Obash—were not at home. But Rafie shot two other residents, killing one of them, before returning to the roof and shooting himself in the head. The rifle was found next to him; on a nearby roof, police retrieved an empty guitar case, which they believe he used to carry the gun.

The Yellow Dogs formed when two of the members left another band they had started as teen-agers; their idea, Soroush Farazmand said, was “to start something new, with new concepts and new ideas, no rules and tons of passion.” The young men used to hang out in a park called Ghoory, a local spot for counterculture types, and found a drummer with a “a small secret rehearsal space on the roof and a crazy punk rocker/skater/shoplifter guy who could play guitar and sing.” In Tehran and its suburbs, the Yellow Dogs had to play in basements and soundproofed studios to avoid fines or arrest. Their concerts used to be shut down within minutes. Yet, they gained a following; they were featured in a film about underground music in Iran, called “No One Knows About Persian Cats”—and began to receive invitations to American festivals. Unfortunately, only one of the members had a passport. (“The rest of the band couldn’t get them,” Soroush explained, “because in Iran all the men have to do their military service before they can leave the country.”) The band was unable to accept invitations in 2009 to play at South by Southwest and the CMJ festival, in New York, but they played a concert in Turkey, and, while they were there, went to the American embassy in Istanbul to get artists’ visas. Their decision to move to Brooklyn seemed pretty natural: the borough is more than welcoming to rock musicians and their lush, creative hair. The Yellow Dogs made their home something like a haven and party hub for Iranian creative types, musicians, and stencil-graffiti artists.

This nascent Iranian Bushwick scene also included the Free Keys, whom the Yellow Dogs called their “sister band”; the two acts had built an “illegal DIY space” in Tehran together. The Keys moved to Brooklyn in 2011, and stayed with the Yellow Dogs. Arash Farazmand had been one of their founding members before joining the Yellow Dogs; Rafie, the shooter, had once been his bandmate. He had apparently been pushed out of the Free Keys last year, after accusations that he had stolen money from the band; he tried to rejoin, but he was met with a “no.” As John J. McCarthy, the Police Department’s spokesman, told the Times, “He’s upset that he’s not in the band.” The Yellow Dogs’ manager, Ali Salehezadeh, said that Rafie hadn’t spoken to his victims in months because of a “very petty conflict.”

Paul Farrell, a journalist and radio producer who saw the Yellow Dogs play a few months after they first arrived in the U.S., recalled an impatience that marked the group in a piece for the Guardian: about Karampour, the lead singer, Farrell remembered “an urgency for him to be on stage that can only come from understanding what it’s like to live in a country where that one step onto a stage can cost a person their freedom.” In Iran, the Yellow Dogs told CNN in 2009, “the law has a problem with rock music.”

“Basically, there’s no music scene” in Tehran, Karampour said in an interview with NowThis News earlier this year. (There weren’t any “hipster chicks” either, one of his bandmates added.) “We knew there was no audience for us—we were like the weirdos back in Iran,” Koory Mirz, the band’s bassist, said. “But when we came here, it was like ‘Oh, thank you! People like me over here! I’m not that crazy guy back in Iran.’ ” The band had been warmly received in New York—they played the Knitting Factory, Brooklyn Bowl, Webster Hall. In his last interview, which was published Tuesday in Vice, Soroush Farazmand said that he still thought the band was edgy, but that they had been “much more rebellious when we were living in Iran.”

The band’s unusual path to Brooklyn was undoubtedly part of their appeal to music journalists, but the Yellow Dogs wore their status as post-punk refugees lightly: they were here to make music, not sell their story. “It’s not my responsibility to represent Iran,” Karampour said during the band’s interview with NowThis News. “Are you kidding me?” No, he continued, “I represent my art.” Besides, Mirz added, “If I go back, they’re probably going to kill me. I’m serious.”

On Monday morning, the first comment underneath a Wall Street Journal blog post on the murder read, “Those Iranian’s…they know fire power.” It would be too easy, perhaps, to observe that there was nothing very Iranian about this story and much that was uniquely American: not just the manner of death but the particular blend of irony and pathos in how the young men who fled from retributive violence in their own country met a violent end in ours.

“They were great kids who people just loved. They looked cool and they played great music,” their manager, Salehezadeh, told the Associated Press. “They wanted to be known for their music.”

The President is learning the same lesson faced by twelve of his predecessors: dealing with Pyongyang is the toughest diplomatic challenge in the world.

Although the N.F.L. has long banned substances such as anabolic steroids and growth hormones, the First Amendment is believed to be the only right guaranteed by the Constitution to be included on the list.